GWB scandal provides plenty of fodder for late-night talk shows

As if there weren’t already enough Jersey jokes, Governor Christie’s George Washington Bridge scandal has sent late-night comedians into overdrive. The Garden State hit the big time this week — once again, for the wrong reason.

Besides the opening-monologue jokes, Letterman’s “Top 10 Highlights of the Chris Christie Press Conference” and a fake commentary by Christie in The Onion, The New Yorker’s new cover has an illustration of the governor, looking like a child in suspendered shorts, playing with a ball on the GWB, oblivious to the traffic backed up behind him. The only reason the governor will escape being ridiculed by “Saturday Night Live” this week is that the show is a repeat. He had already gotten a bit of a reprieve because Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do not air on Friday night.

Nothing makes comics and satirists happier than a petty, juicy, too-nonsensical-to-make-up political scandal.

On Friday night’s “Late Show” — which was taped the night before — David Letterman’s monologue featured six Christie jokes, including this: “And you know why this is such a big deal? Because Chris Christie wants to be president of the United States. … And this’ll be good, because we haven’t had a president of this country with goons since Richard Nixon, so we’re very, very excited about that.”

It was a continuing theme from Thursday night’s show, which Letterman began by saying “The polar vortex has departed. It was supposed to leave Monday night, but it got stuck on the George Washington Bridge.”

Letterman was not the only late-night host to use the bridge scandal as monologue fodder.

“So sorry I was late getting out here,” Jimmy Fallon said as he took the stage for “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” on Thursday night. “Apparently I pissed off Chris Christie and he popped the tires on my CitiBike.”

On Thursday, Jay Leno told viewers that Christie doesn’t know yet about a presidential run in 2016, then added, “I guess he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.” And later in the monologue: “Pundits are saying this could hurt his 2016 presidential campaign. The ironic thing is now that Christie is denying everything, he sounds more presidential, doesn’t he?”

Both Leno and Letterman also made jokes about Christie’s weight. And Conan O’Brien used the scandal as an occasion to make the typical Jersey joke, writing on Twitter on Thursday, “If Chris Christie had blocked people from entering New Jersey he’d be a hero.” (His monologue that night was Christie-free.)

Jersey guy Jon Stewart was on the case a night earlier, discussing the situation on Wednesday’s “The Daily Show.”

Stewart saved most of his shots that night for Christie’s staff and their emails, blasting them for their “piss-poor, third-rate quality of corruption.”

“This is New Jersey, a state renowned for its piss-rich, first-rate quality of corruption,” Stewart said, taking his audience through highlights of New Jersey’s rich history of corruption, both real and fictional. “Have you seen our state flag? There is literally a severed horse’s head on the state flag!”

Stewart, who grew up in Lawrenceville, called the emails “an embarrassment to dialogue.” He suggested the email exchange should have been written in stereotypical cryptic mob-speak. (“I took care of that thing. Our good friend Lee, he’s constipated all right. … He’s going to be backed up all week.”)

The next night, Stewart talked about Christie’s press conference before “The Colbert Report” took its best shot. “In a triumphant 108-minute, someone-else-a-culpa, Christie faced these allegations head-on with a press conference that jammed the airways with a 32-denial pile-up,” said Colbert, a Montclair resident.

Then after a clip of Christie talking about how sad he was but doesn’t know the stages of grief, Colbert interrupted, “Wait, I know this. The stages of grief, it goes sadness, press conference, denial, anger, uh, political death.”

The Onion, a satirical news website, featured that faux Christie commentary (“Really, take a good, hard look. Do I seriously strike you as the type of person who would vengefully go after a rival political group who opposed my administration’s policies?”) as well as a news story.